CIA — Section IV: ESP and Psychokinesis

TL;DR — A declassified CIA survey of Soviet parapsychology research, including Vasiliev’s telepathy experiments.

⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. US federal government work (17 USC §105).

Sanitized and approved for release; dated July 1972.

The section opens by conceding the difficulty of its own subject: “it is very difficult to speak of one area of psychic phenomenon without overlapping into other areas.” It then surveys Soviet work from the 1930s onward, centred on L. L. Vasiliev, described as the father of Soviet parapsychology — in particular the electromagnetically shielded-chamber telepathy experiments intended to test whether the effect survived screening.

Read as a primary source on what an intelligence service believed was worth funding, which is a different and more interesting question than whether any of it was real.

Where this came from

• Brendan Sheehan’s public are.na channel

9 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.